


the garden, never tended

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, in which merle is a good dad and an absent dad and a bad dad, merle character study, trying to reconcile clints dad tendencies, with merles canonical abandonment of his fam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 09:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11529210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: Some people just weren't cut out to be husbands.





	the garden, never tended

 

It's embarrassing to the community, apparently, to have a minister who isn't married.

Hecuba is. She's nice. She's strong-willed and decisive and has bright brown eyes and in another life, Merle thinks they would be excellent friends. Her previous husband died in a mining accident, which she tells him about dry-eyed, one hand on her full stomach. She's no-nonsense about it. She loved him, he died, she's going to have a baby daughter now and if Merle wants her, they're a package deal. Never mind that its an arranged marriage: she's turned down three other fine dwarves because she thought they wouldn't treat her daughter like their own.

Merle thinks that it's how much he likes Mavis after she's born, that he changes diapers and carries her around Hecuba's place at four AM in the morning while Mavis screams her little baby lungs out, that that's what makes Hecuba agree to marry him.

Their wedding is lovely. Very much a church wedding. Hecuba wears Pan-green while she walks down the aisle, and Mavis sleeps in a little basket next to them and wakes up and cries when Merle kisses Hecuba and everyone cheers.

They have a nice house a short walk from the shore. Hecuba's family lives a short walk away and they do a lot of visiting. Merle ministers on the weekends and runs youth groups. He's not bad at it, but it feels a little bit pointless. It's preaching to the choir - quite literally.

The first few months of their marriage are rough. But they find a rhythm eventually, and as long as they do not spend too much time together, him and Hecuba get along swimmingly. He figures that's alright. Plenty of husbands and wives who can't stand to share space for too long. At least they still share the same bed.

Merle spends a lot of time at the beach, sitting on the sand and watching the waves crash down and drag sand into their depths. He wonders if the beach will still look like this in fifty years, a hundred. He thinks about a hundred years of being married to Hecuba, a hundred years of sitting at the beach. At least the shape of the waves changes.

Some days he takes Mavis with him, and she runs in the surf and collects shells and shows them to him, and he nods solemnly and says "that's a nice shell, sweetheart," and those are the moments when he thinks he could be happy here.

And then he takes Mavis home, and kisses his wife perfunctorily on the cheek and it's not bad, it's good, it's fine, and he's not unhappy to fall asleep next to Hecuba to the sound of her snoring. It's a good life, he has a kid and another kid on the way and a wife and a solid job, and every day he walks the same path to the temple and talks to the same people and comes home to the same house.

Mookie is born kicking and screaming. It's tied with Mavis's birth as the best moments of Merle's life, when he's handed his son, a tightly-wrapped bundle of squalling infant. "He's perfect," Merle says to Hecuba, and he means it, the kid's the best thing that's happened to him, he thinks, and in that moment its true. He can't imagine leaving.

When Mookie is a little older, he takes him to the beach with him and Mavis, and slathers sunscreen on the two of them (because Hecuba would yell otherwise) and he watches them build sandcastles (well, Mavis builds sandcastles, Mookie knocks them down and giggles), and he thinks he could be happy.

But kids grow up. And Merle will still be here, sitting at the beach, watching the waves.

Sometimes Merle sits down to dinner (like he sat down to dinner the night before, and the night before) and it will be okay. He cuts Mookie's food into bite-sized pieces and listens to Mavis talk about school and him and Hecuba will glance over the kids' heads and smile at each other. These are good nights.

Other nights, he sits down to dinner and everything will feel out of sync, like a movie where the audio is one beat off. It will not be bad, but he will be rocked by the sudden belief that this is not where he is supposed to be, that he is not supposed to be sitting across from his wife, that this is the wrong kitchen, that he is the wrong soul for this life. He prays on those nights. It doesn't help, but sometimes Pan talks back and it's nice to have the distraction.

It's spring, when he leaves. It's a Wednesday, and they're out of bread. Hecuba asks him to go to the corner store to pick some up, and Merle nods from where he is sitting on the couch editing a sermon. He sets his papers down, shrugs on his jacket and ceremonial hammer. He pulls on his boots. He absently pats Mavis and Mookie on the heads as he heads out the door, their voices echoing "Bye daddy!" as it slams shut.

Merle walks down the path from his house to his street. He walks down the street to the corner store, and walks past it. Slowly the town turns to wilderness, greenery creeping up on the sidewalks and sand receding, the sidewalk turning to a dirt path, turning to a single dusty road bordered on both sides by gnarled trees. Soon, he can no longer hear the ocean.

He keeps walking. The occasional cart rumbles past him. Hecuba must be wondering where he is, Merle thinks. It's past the kids' bedtimes. Like a man sleepwalking, he sticks his hand out to flag a cart down. Eventually, someone stops.

"Mind if I hitch a ride?" Merle asks as if it's someone else talking. "Sure," the driver says. "You got coin?"

Merle nods, and hands him the money he was going to spend at the store. The driver offers him a hand up, and he hefts himself onto the passenger seat.

"Where you headed?" the driver asks.

"How far you going?" Merle responds.

Merle gets off at Neverwinter, and low on gold after the trip, takes the first job he finds to pay for an inn. it's a disaster, but Merle saves two lives and when he gets back to the city he immediately signs on for another trip.

Time passes. He takes any job that comes his way, scanning Craig's List and talking to folk in bars and in temples and going anywhere that might need a cleric. Healers are always in short supply, and Merle explores caves and forests and guards carts and crosses Faerun from end to end.

Merle sits in bars and taverns and on carts and tells people about Pan and passes out pamphlets. Mostly people laugh at him, or tell him to quit it with the prostelgzing. Sometimes he gets into fierce, drawn-out religious debates with other clerics and they spend the night kicking around religious theory with each other as the campfire embers flicker out, and Merle falls asleep under the stars.

He doesn't spend much money. He sends most of it home, without a letter, without any indication that it's him sending it. As long as he keeps sending it, Merle figures, it's okay. He's thinking about his kids. A college fund, or something. They need that, right? He's making more money as an adventurer than he was as a hometown cleric.

"Just one more job," he thinks to himself as he scans Craig's list. "One more and then I'll go home."

It's been three years since he's seen his kids. They must be taller now, kids grow like weeds. He wonders if Hecuba takes the kids to the beach. Maybe he'll go back soon, take them on a day trip. Bring them some souvenirs.

He knows he's lying.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! 
> 
> liner notes:
> 
> i think it's interesting, if merle is actually like. really good at being a dad but also really bad at being part of a nuclear family and being a dude who has a stable lifestyle. merle was meant to be a wandering minister, lets be real.
> 
> man i know i always say writing in character is hard but merle. is so hard. because his life experience is so wildly ahead of mine that its like ??? who even are you, merle 
> 
> im @[anonymousalchemist](http://anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com/) if you wanna talk taz or want to check out haphazard pieces of fic/meta i dont post here!


End file.
